The Ph.D. candidate David Fontanals, former predoctoral member of ADHUC—Research Center on Theory, Gender, Sexuality, will defend his doctoral dissertation “From the World of Yesterday to the Europe of Tomorrow: On Commitment, Ethics, and Europe in the Works of Stefan Zweig”, supervised by Rodrigo Andrés (ADHUC—Universitat de Barcelona) and Loreto Vilar (Universitat de Barcelona). This dissertation examines the oeuvre of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig from the perspective of his commitment to (the idea of) Europe. Using his memoirs, Die Welt von Gestern (1942), as a hermeneutical and referential framework, Fontanals studies how Zweig negotiated through his work his responsibility as a writer and as an intellectual, from fin-de-siècle Vienna to his exile in Petropolis, Brazil, during World War II, from Verhaeren (1910) to Michel de Montaigne (1941). At the end of the analysis, Zweig’s ‘Europe’ emerges as an—individual and collective—identity paradigm and as an ethical program based on the notions of peace, freedom, post-nationalism, and humanism. Thus, Zweig’s ‘European’ legacy acquires a contemporary dimension that allows us to incorporate his voice to the current debates on the identity and the future of Europe.
